


Is my business just a cover for the Mafia? I take a front to that.

by DearSweetAnon



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Gen, Mafia AU, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-04
Packaged: 2020-06-09 12:34:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19476025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DearSweetAnon/pseuds/DearSweetAnon
Summary: Bill and Babe's new local haunt seems to be suspiciously open all hours, the staff are always changing, but at least the coffee's good.





	Is my business just a cover for the Mafia? I take a front to that.

**Author's Note:**

> Aaaaah I hope you like it!! I was wondering about how to do a coffee shop au so I combined two AUs, I hope you don't mind!

“Look, let’s just get a cup of coffee, okay?” Babe is starting to get desperate. Bill had insisted on being out all day, which would have been fine, except that Bill had been adamant that they wouldn’t stop for lunch.    
“Frannie says that skipping lunch makes your metabolism work harder”, Bill had said, but Babe didn’t really trust the word of Cosmo-through-Frannie-filter, so he wanted to grab at least a coffee, and maybe even a sandwich. Bill finally conceded, and allowed Babe to start looking for a place to pull over. In most of the neighborhoods they worked in, a cop car pulling over wouldn’t be welcome. At last he caught sight of a little coffee shop, just a block down from the station, that seemed to have popped up between Babe’s last shift and now. ‘Bastogne Coffee’, it proclaimed itself to be, from a trendily scruffy black sign. 

“Huh,” said Babe. “How about that place?” 

“Huh,” said Bill. “Sure.”

They swung into a conveniently empty spot in front of the coffee shop’s front door, and ambled inside. Within the shop, a man with a distinctive scar across his cheek was leaning against the large, gleaming coffee machine. Once he noticed them enter the shop, he perked up. “Good afternoon, sir. And sir. Can I get you anything?” 

Babe glanced up at the menu hanging above the counter. “Uh yeah, just a flat white, please. Bill?”

“Oat milk hot chocolate, thanks very much.”

“Sorry, a what?” said Babe, surprised.

“Frannie says that we should be trying to cut dairy out of our diet.”

If Bill had a stat sheet of catchphrases, ‘Frannie says’ would be at the top of that list. Closely followed by him referring to himself as Ol’ Gonorrhea. If Babe was being particularly honest, he didn’t think that calling yourself an STD was something to be particularly proud of, but each to their own, as his Ma liked to say. 

They sat together in a seat by the window, sipping on their drinks. The man behind the counter fiddled with his phone, glancing up at them once in a while. Babe thought he was probably just eager to get them out of the shop, so he could go back to whatever he was doing before in peace. 

They went back to the little shop a few days later, this time at the weekend, before Bill and Babe’s shift began. This time, however, the shop was a little busier, with a shorter man behind the counter, as well as the man from before, with the scar on his cheek. The men casually chatted to each other, wiping down the machines. 

“Hi again!” said Babe, brightly. “Flat white, please.” 

Bill asked for another overly fancy drink, listing a few complicated ingredients that made Babe’s head spin. 

“Why don’t you get started on that flat white, Luz?”

The shorter man, Luz apparently, rolled his eyes and smiled. “Typical, Lip. Don’t trust me on the difficult stuff?”

“Now, Luz, you know I don’t think anything like that. I-”

As the two men bicker, light-heartedly, another person enters the shop, the very definition of ‘tall, dark and handsome’ His hair falls onto his face in some places, and he seems to know the guys behind the counter, Luz and Lip. He strides into the back room, and Babe assumes, therefore, that he must also work there, but as ten, fifteen, twenty minutes pass and he doesn’t return, it occurs to him that the man must have either gone out a back door, or just be lurking in the stock room. Either way, he probably doesn’t work there. 

Bill and Babe head back to Bastogne Coffee the very next day, but they’re stunned when they push open the door, only to be met by about twenty glowering faces staring back at them. 

“Uh, hi?” Babe ventures. “Are you guys open?”

“No.” states the dark haired man who they had seen yesterday.

Another guy, Lip, shoots him a look, before fixing a smile on his face. “Of course we are. What can I get you?”

“Lip, are you sure we can-” starts another, but Lip cuts him off. 

“It’s fine, Shifty.”

Obviously, he was about to say ‘are you sure we can trust them?’, which really begs the question, why do they need to be trustworthy? What in this coffee shop cannot be exposed to the general public? Babe can tell that they’re not really welcome at the moment, no matter what’s going on.

“Uh, I’ll just get a flat white. Please?” Everyone’s gaze then slides to Bill.

“Just a black coffee.”

Once they have their drinks, they dash out of the shop, seemingly thinking the same thought.

“Okay, what the fuck was going on there?” says Bill, taking a sip of his coffee. He grimaces, and throws it straight into a rubbish bin. “God, I hate black coffee.”

“Then why get it?”, snorts Babe.

“Are you kidding? Ask for something that actually tastes nice, and have to wait in there for more than thirty seconds. I swear, Babe, they were about a minute away from killing us. You see that guy over by the wall?”

Babe had indeed seen the guy over by the wall, easily six foot tall, chewing on a cigar stump. He’d looked like he could have taken Babe out with just one swing. 

“But seriously, what was going on in there?” he asked, as they rushed back to the police station. “Those guys looked seriously dodgy.”

“Are you saying that you think that there’s something fishy going on?”

Bill stops in his tracks, and slaps his hand on Babe’s chest.

“Ow.”

“Maybe they’re being  _ blackmailed. _ ”

That night, Babe is lying on the couch, face down, when his roommate walks in. 

“You alright, Babe?”

“Hiya, Gene. I’m dying a little. How’re you?”

“Why you dying, Babe?” 

“Oh, you know. Bill thinks the guys at the coffee shop near the station are being blackmailed by the mafia or something.”

“Oh.” He sits down, right on Babe’s legs. “Do you think they’re being blackmailed?”

“Ow, ow, ow. I dunno. There’s this guy, he looks kinda like he might be a serial killer. But the guys who work there, or at least there’s this one guy who works there, they don’t seem to be scared of him.”

Gene shrugs. “I guess you’d better investigate a bit. You know, like a cop. Lucky for you, I’ve heard that’s sort of your job.”

In the morning, Babe and Bill head back to Bastogne coffee, with a new mission in mind. Babe walks through the door, a step behind Bill, and makes awkward eye contact with Lip, behind the counter. Luckily, Bill decides to take the lead. “Good morning, sir. Can we ask you a couple of questions?” 

The guy from the day before, possibly called Swifty, comes hurrying out of the backroom, wide eyed, and Luz pops up from underneath the counter. Babe can feel the prickle of stares on the back of his neck, and he knows that everyone else in the shop is observing them. 

“Of course,” smiles Lip. “Shifty, can you go and stack the cups?”

“Stack the cups? Oh right, stack the cups!”

Bill asks, “Is this your shop? Are you the owner?”

“No, no. My friend Ron is the owner.” Luz rolls his eyes (seemingly a common behaviour for him) and mouths ‘ _ friends _ ’. Lip nudges him. “I guess I’m technically the manager. I really just run it as a favour for him.”

“Right, right. And how long have you been in the area?”

“Oh, just a couple of weeks.”

Bill scribbles that down. “And what made him want to go into coffee... shopping?”

A silence falls over the whole shop. 

“What can I say, I love the customer service experience.”

Babe freezes, and turns around to see the dark man, probably Ron, standing in the doorway. He feels a shiver run down his spine at the cold stare that he’s being fixed with. 

Bill and Babe both decide to leave the shop, running away from the cold hatred of ‘Ron’. They end up in an alley behind the coffee shop, and run smack into the guy, Luz, hauling a black bin bag out towards the skip. He struggles to throw it into the dumpster, and it lands with an odd thump. Babe looks at Bill, then at Luz, then at Bill again. Once Luz has retreated back into the coffee shop, Bill hops up into the skip and starts tearing open the bag, only to reveal a rather anticlimactic pile of used cups. Defeated, they decide to head back to the police station. 

“Maybe we should find something better to do with ourselves? Rather than hanging around here, trying to solve a mystery that doesn’t exist.”

_ “Guys, fuck, I think they were watching me take that stuff out back. What if they find it?”  _

_ Speirs fixes Luz with his signature unimpressed stare.  _

_ “No one is going to find out. They think we’re being blackmailed by the mafia. They don’t know the truth, and they won’t know.” _

_ Lip nods in agreement. “As long as everyone’s careful and keeps their head, we can keep this place as a front for the business.” _

_ From the corner, Tab, a new recruit looks up. “Wait, the business?” He pauses in thought. “Oh my God, I’ve joined the mafia, haven’t I?” He looks upset. “I thought this was just a coffee shop run by weirdos. Aw, fuck.”  _

  
  



End file.
